Pure water and the problem with plastics
You have just finished a long walk on a hot day; you saunter into the kitchen and pull out a refreshing bottle of water from your refrigerator, quickly guzzling it down to quench your well-earned thirst. You drop the bottle into the recycling bin or trash and continue on with your evening, but have you ever stopped to think where your bottle ends up? Sure there is a chance it will end up in recycling facility, but even in that scenario it will require energy and manual labor to recycle the plastic. Most plastic bottles end up in landfills, dumps, waterways, or drifting through our cities and parks. For example on the island of Midway Atoll, a tiny land mass over one thousand miles away from city life, scientists studying the albatross discovered that many of the birds were dying from eating rogue plastic caps from water bottles.
There are of course other environmental problems with the use of plastics. The two commonly used plastics are thermoplastic and thermoset plastic. With time and energy, thermoplastics can be re-melted and reused, but thermoset plastics cannot be remelted and are primarily shredded and used as filler in other products. All plastics, however, degrade in quality with each reuse and can only be recycled a few times.
Recycling plastic can be very problematic in general. One of the biggest problems with recycling plastic is that it is difficult to sort using automatic sorting devices, so recycling companies need to hire laborers to hand sort the products. Because the profit in recycling plastic in comparison to metal is much lower, many plastic bottles simply go to the dump.
Because plastic has been such an important development in our culture, scientists attempted to develop a plastic that breaks down with long exposure to sunlight. Researchers conducted tests to see how quickly and completely the biodegradable plastic would break down over time. The research findings concluded that, although the plastic broke down rather quickly, it did not break down entirely. In another attempt to solve the plastics problems a team of scientists engineered a bacteria that synthesize a plastic that will break down completely over a relatively short period of time; however, introducing a new bacteria into the environment is unsafe as scientists can’t accurately calculate the long lasting impact that it will have on the ecosystem.
Our culture has developed a dependence on plastic. Plastics are not evil, but one can see the issues that arise with over using them. Why bother with all the labor costs, the environmental hazards, pollution, and waste? The best way to enjoy refreshing, healthy, pure water is to buy a Kangen water system for your home or office. This investment will not only save you money, as you will not have to continue buying bottled water, but it will help protect the environment. Furthermore, many Kangen water offers health benefits that most bottled water does not have like antioxidant water and alkaline water. Your body will thank you, your wallet will thank you, and if albatrosses could speak, you can bet they would thank you.
